Why Geographic Analysis

HES 505 Fall 2024: Session 2

Carolyn Koehn

Checking in

  1. What are some advantages and disadvantages of using R for spatial analysis

  2. What can I clarify about the course?

  3. How do you feel about git and github classroom? How can I make that easier for you?

Today’s Plan

  • What can we do with geographic information?

  • Conceptual challenges

  • Analytical challenges

  • Critiques of quantitative geography

What can we do with spatial data?

What is geography

  • Geo: land, earth, terrain

  • Graph: writing, discourse

  • Tuan: Space (extent) and Place (location)

  • Analysis of the effects of extent and location on events or features

Five Themes in Geography

  • Location

  • Place

  • Region

  • Movement

  • Human-Environment Interaction

WGBH Educational Foundation

Location

The place (on Earth) of a particular geographic feature

Location

The place (on Earth) of a particular geographic feature

Place

What is a location like?

Forest cover map by Robert Simmons via Wikimedia Commons; temp map from GISgeography.com

Place

What is a location like?

Region

How are different areas similar or different?

Region

How are different areas similar or different?

Movement

How do genes, individuals, populations, ideas, goods, etc traverse the landscape.

Movement

How do genes, individuals, populations, ideas, goods, etc traverse the landscape.

Both maps courtesy of High Country News

Human-Environment Interactions

How do people relate to and change the physical world to meet their needs?

Smoke map courtesy of Capital Public Radio; Nightlights courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.

Towards quantitative spatial analysis

‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.
Waldo Tobler

Description

  • Coordinates
  • Distances
  • Neighbors
  • Summary statistics

courtesy of innovative GIS

Description

  • Range Maps
  • Hotspots
  • Indices

Explanation and Inference

  • Cognitive Description: collection ordering and classification of data

  • Cause and Effect: design-based or model-based testing of the factors that give rise to geographic distributions

  • Systems Analysis: describes the entire complex set of interactions that structure an activity

Prediction

  • Extend description or explanation into unmeasured space
  • Stationarity: the rules governing a process do not drift over space-time

Conceptual challenges

Scale

What do we even mean?

  • Grain: the smallest unit of measurement
  • Extent: the areal coverage of the measurement

From Manson 2008

Scale

Even if it exists, how do we know we are measuring at the right scale?

Fallacies

  • Locational Fallacy: Error due to the spatial characterization chosen for elements of study

  • Atomic Fallacy: Applying conclusions from individuals to entire spatial units

  • Ecological Fallacy: Applying conclusions from aggregated information to individuals

Measurement Error and Mismatch

Spatial Autocorrelation

From Manuel Gimond

Stationarity

The rules governing a process do not drift over space-time

  • First Order effects: any event has an equal probability of occurring in a location

  • Second Order effects: the location of one event is independent of the other events

From Manuel Gimond

Key Critiques

Not all geography needs to be quantitative

  1. Abstraction removes the interesting part
  2. What “is” may require assumptions we don’t want to accept
  3. Wholly dependent on the military-industrial complex

Wrapping Up

  1. Themes in geography
  2. Description, explanation, prediction
  3. Key challenges and critiques